Instacart is Going Public - Is It Still In Demand?

Instacart, the gig economy's shopping app, has filed to go public.

If you haven't used the app, Instacart is like asking your friend to pick up milk, except it isn't your friend. The platform connects buyers, shoppers, and grocery stores and has gained a lot of momentum during lockdowns back in 2019.

Lockdowns are all gone and most of us are out and about these days, which makes me wonder - is Instacart still in demand?

We can look at usage trends but the real answer lies in new downloads, which show if the platform is growing or not.

Let's start at the top. According to our App Intelligence, Instacart saw 46M downloads since 2020 while its shopper app saw 22M downloads.

The App Store leads in share, with nearly double the downloads as the Android version. Although the app is also available in Canada, the US is by far Instacart's biggest market. A bit duh, but it could become a bigger market post IPO.

The road to 46M (and 22M) wasn't very simple though.

Instacart started 2019 with 343K downloads in January, according to our estimates. Those were fairly consistent all the way up to April of 2020, covid month, and downloads skyrocketed to 2.3M. That's nearly six times higher!

Although they dropped almost immediately, the new average was already twice that of 2019 and going into 2021 and 2022, it continued to rise peaking at 1.4M in December of 2022.

2023, the year things finally went back to normal, has not been as great for Instacart. Just average, I'd say. Downloads dropped after their peak in December, but are still much higher than 2019's with 964K downloads in August.

The shopper app, which is what the shoppers use to see their tasks and communicate with users followed a similar, yet lower, trend. The correlation leads me to believe that covid made Instacart into a household name but aggressive marketing is what's keeping demand for on both ends growing.

Looking at these trends I expect a rocky IPO, but I'm no financial advisor.